


You're a Bad Idea

by panicattackkisses



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 80's Vibes, AU, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, I suck at tags, long hot summer, love to hate, small town aesthetic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-06-26 23:49:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15673764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panicattackkisses/pseuds/panicattackkisses
Summary: When the town is too small and the heat is too much, you gotta get out. Town princess Clarke Griffin meets lost boy Bellamy Blake and tries so hard to be good, to stay away, to keep her summer job. But the world gets so much bigger when they're together.A story of sneaking out, midnight swims, mix tapes, burnt noses, too long summers, sun bleached hair and kissing people you're not supposed to kiss.





	1. Chapter 1

Clarke grimaced into the chlorine blue pool water, wrinkled her nose at the old band aid that she’d caught in the ridiculously oversized net she had to use. She flicked it into the nearby trash can, wiped her hands on the hem of her too large shirt, the one that had “lifeguard” emblazoned on the front of it and squinted into the summer sun.

It was barely nine in the morning, the first Saturday of the summer vacation and it brought intense heat, the kind that stuck to your skin, created new freckles across pink cheeks. The sky was cloudless, a hazy blue that promised higher temperatures as the day grew busier. Idaho was ruthless in June, the skies barren of any cloud cover, no rain, only ninety degree heat and the numbers kept climbing.

Clarke had taken the job after her only other option had been secretary at her mothers private practice. She really didn’t plan to spend her last summer before college stuck inside a medical waiting room of Griffin’s Medical, surrounded by the coughs and sneezes of Shallow Valley’s most susceptible. 

Instead she donned a threadbare shirt that had probably been worn twenty years prior to her birth, sat on a rickety chair on top of the tower and hoped to god little Charlotte from across the block didn’t cross the two foot line.

The owner, Marcus Kane, was Shallow Valley’s busy body, with community council meetings and businesses on every other corner of the small space that Shallow Valley covered. The “Eden Pool House” was the probably the oldest and home to a bunch of delinquents, staff and customers included. How Kane entrusted a group of teenagers, to ensure a larger group of younger teenagers didn’t hit their heads on the pool floor was beyond Clarke.

Their staff line up wasn’t exactly one that Mrs Shumway from Mount Weather Street would happily hand her children over to, with each one of them having a more vague idea of what qualified as CPR than the last. 

You see, Shallow Valley's biggest problem was how damn small it was. With a population of just over eight hundred, everyone knew everyone and people rarely left. There was Main Street, one long promenade that life centred around. It had the usual family run stores: the bakery, a butcher, a diner that still housed a jukebox, a grocery store that was stuck in the eighties and a cinema that used slide in lettering above its doors to tell the public what was currently screening. There was the town hall that held monthly meetings about the important topics, like who would get the front stall at the next Sunday market? And would there be a town fair this summer?

The houses were classic, small town American; wooden clad with porches and shutters on the windows, neatly clipped garden lawns and streets that were lined with oak trees. Beyond the town, for townsfolk who dared to venture that far, there was a forest that marked the beginnings of the sprawling mountains that encased their small town in it’s own sunsoaked valley. 

The community pool was at the heart of it, nestled between two neighbourhoods and across from the Valley’s only park (complete with Victorian era bandstand). The pool itself was clean and void of any questionable items for the most part but the yard was another property of Kane’s that had become frozen in the past. The soundsystem crackled like a record player, the slide was sunbleached and barely still blue. The sun loungers and deck chairs were red and white, only just standing and stained in curious places. Bunting hung around the rectangle pool in the summer months, undeniably patriotic in its red, white and blue colour scheme. 

The food stand sold ice pops that matched, hot dogs and pizza slices that Clarke didn’t like to ingest and slushies the size of the pool floats that kids from over the last two decades had slowly chewed corners off of.

And as the bell tower four streets over chimed that it was now nine o’clock in the morning, the chain link fence that surrounded the outdoor pool rattled, and the rest of her team appeared. All of them were in different states of tiredness and disarray - many hungover, a few possibly still inebriated but most importantly, every one of them wearing their ratty mustard yellow shirts with the words “Lifeguard” or “Staff” printed in red.

They could be seen from space. 

Jasper Jordan and Monty Green were a duo that Clarke had known since kindergarten, the two boys that lived down the street and awed over her when she used to climb the trees in the park higher than they could. They both grew up clumsily - lanky and somewhat shy - with sharp wit that came out when prodded and a not so secret penchant for “botany” that had Councilman Jaha at their garage door more than once. 

The two had shown up at the recruitment day with Jasper still half asleep, his usual mop of brown hair shaved off and dyed platinum blonde to mark the glorious end to their high school era. Monty was the intellectual of the two, an Asian boy with a kind smile who always had a lighter on him. His brain was something that Clarke had admired through Middle School and beyond, his mind working in ways that many couldn’t fathom. It was Monty alone who managed to get them both hired, the two in charge of running the food stall (a position that Clarke had found highly ironic).

Raven Reyes followed, a Latina with an athletic build and long, dark hair that Clarke had always seen in a ponytail. She was an overachiever with an attitude problem, another one of Mercury High School’s most gifted, with a 4.0 GPA and advanced learning in mechanical engineering by the age of sixteen.

Raven Reyes knew how to make a smoke bomb from three household items, could break into your home using only a bobby pin and could do both whilst stealing your man and your girl. She was the human form of dynamite and Clarke had been lucky enough to have been her science fair partner in the third grade.

(They had ripped up their class issued instructions on how to make a paper mache volcano and destroyed the school hall instead. Their project that explained how friction worked on objects in motion, caused a small fire, a broken window pane and a faculty member quit due to stress. They received 2 weeks of detention, first prize and an A minus.)

Raven was another lifeguard, one that was actually a strong swimmer, but she had a “suck it up and rub some dirt on it” attitude that unfortunately didn’t work well with children. So she stuck to sitting in the guard tower for most of her shifts, turning her olive skin darker in the sun and judging people from a distance over the tops of her sunglasses. She was pretty, she was inexplicably intelligent and Clarke thanked whatever deity existed that she was her best friend, otherwise, she would be even more terrified of Raven than she already was.

Last through the gate was John Murphy, who went by his last name only. He was sharp in every sense of the word, from his looks to his wit, his sarcasm, his surliness. He didn’t really make friends through his school years, he just seemed to acquire a small selection of people he tolerated and Clarke was still unsure if she was deemed lucky enough one of them. He was dry and snarky and god knows why Kane hired him to supervise kids but there he was, walking behind the rest of them in his yellow shirt that had “staff” printed on it and tired eyes hiding behind a pair of Raybans. He spent the majority of last summer napping behind the old bleachers during the hottest hours and he severely abused his whistle privileges but Clarke had noticed him give the younger kids free ice pops when it got too hot out, an act that he would probably deny until his (most likely early) death, so she was almost sure he was an okay guy.

By quarter past nine, parents had pushed their kids through the open gate before leaving for the coffee shop across the street, sunscreen smeared over noses and shoulders, dollar bills clutched in sticky hands, waiting for popsicles. Hordes of twelve and thirteen year olds had arrived with more noise than necessary for such an early time, abandoning their bikes in a pile on the sidewalk, their shorts and t-shirts left on the damp concrete.

The sun was already growing hotter, the air still. The slushie machine had groaned to life, determined to make it through another summer and Murphy had resided to the highest bench on the bleachers, his staff shirt discarded and his contractually prohibited nipple ring glinting in the morning light.

Clarke sighed.

She climbed the cracked plastic ladder to the guard tower, sat on the chair next to Raven and eyed her already gloriously olive skin with jealousy.

“Ready for another long, hot summer, Griffin?” The brunette asked dryly, the smell of coconut tanning oil already in the air.

Clarke huffed in response, rubbed sunscreen into her warm skin, “you make it sound like you’re expecting something interesting to happen.”

“I mean, you never know, someone might actually need CPR this year-“

“Please don’t fucking jinx it,” Clarke muttered.

“- or the apocalypse could happen and bring a little goddamn rain our way,” Raven continued, slipping oversized sunglasses onto the bridge of her button nose.

“Now that, I would prefer,” Clarke mused, sitting back onto the hot plastic and surveying the already packed pool.

The sign outside said the maximum capacity was eighty but the rule book also stated that the pool closed at six in the evening and that under no circumstances was it to be used outside of those hours. Clarke knew that the last two had been broken many, many times, so when the next group of ten kids ran through the gate and cannonballed their way to the best pool float, she slipped her sunglasses over her eyes too and looked the other way.

“Five bucks says that the ice machine doesn’t make it past two o’clock,” said the brunette, side eyeing a kid at the edge of the shallow end, hands high in the air, right beside the ‘no diving’ sign.

“It broke down yesterday,” Clarke deadpanned, bringing her whistle to her lips when two boys by the slide decided to declare it their own, pushing the younger kids off of it.

“Oh for fuck - HEY! You! That’s not pool appropriate attire pal, get your shorts on!”

A long, hot, fucking summer indeed.


	2. Chapter Two

Bellamy Blake rolled into town with his younger sister asleep in the back of his old pick up truck, one rucksack packed with the bare minimum and his grandmother who he hadn’t seen in over ten years waiting for him at the gate of her home.

 

His home.

 

His new home.

 

Shallow Valley wasn’t the metropolis he was used to, fuck, it was barely a town. The seventeen hour drive from San Francisco had left tall, tall buildings behind him, the architectural landscapes turned epic bridges and bustling highways into forests that seemed bigger than all of them, fields of yellow sandwiched long, straight roads and Jesus Christ, Bellamy missed the ocean. 

 

Everything was emerald and gold and the summer sun changed its heat and suddenly in the middle Idaho, it was oppressive, stifling - the sun had no skyscrapers to hide behind, nothing to shield its glare, not even for a second. 

 

But the trees became taller than Bellamy had ever seen in the city, giant redwoods appearing by the hundreds and for a second, in the front seat of his truck, it didn’t seem so bad anymore.

 

But seventeen hours was a long time to be driving and his mind was working hard. Working hard to remember, to forget, to let go. There was things that made his hands grip the steering wheel harder, made him want to yell out of his open window and into the empty night sky. 

 

But he didn’t.

 

He drove until the dark became light and different state signs rolled past him, until the miles counted downwards and the empty fields and forests were broken up by towns that became smaller and more sparse, until gas stations were manned by just one lone stranger and had only one or two working pumps. 

 

The two of them, his sister and him, drove for hours, had breakfast, lunch and dinner at different diners in different states, bought peaches from a farm on the roadside, sat on the bed of the old pick up truck in the late night warmth and shared their silence, shared their loss, shared the stars and their stories. 

 

They reached the small town of Shallow Valley, Idaho early on the first Saturday morning of summer, the streets barely alive, the air still and the sun already beating down into the cab of the truck. The old air con was stuttering and his sister was still asleep, her head and long hair resting on the open window frame, hardly any breeze to lift the black brown locks that they shared. He passed homes that looked straight out of Country Life magazine, windows with flower boxes on their sills, the smell of fresh berry pie already floating out of a bakery that had its doors opened. Glass bottles of milk sat on each doorstep, green garden lawns had trees with tire swings and welcome mats on the porch.

 

This wasn’t San Francisco. There was no ocean air, no art markets, no pizza stands that stayed open until four am. The tallest building was an old bell tower and Bellamy was amazed to see an outdoor pool yard, a bright blue patch amongst the green, surrounded by an old fence and looking like it came straight out of an eighties teen movie.

 

His grandmother was a woman he’d hardly seen growing up, a part of his family tree on the Filipino side that his mother never really spoke about. But then again, his mother didn’t really speak about much. 

 

He was sure he’d last seen his grandmother ten years ago, way back on his eleventh birthday. She’d brought him presents tied in bright orange ribbons, homemade cookies and when she had wrapped him in a hug, he remembered her smelling of brown sugar and laundry detergent. 

 

She was a warm woman, strong. A once solid presence in his life who vanished for reasons he hadn’t understood in his youth. He remembered the night of his birthday party in flashes, a scene played out from the crack in his doorframe.

 

His mother had gotten drunk, again, sloppy and crying as her own mother rubbed her back and murmured words to her in Tagalog that Bellamy had never been taught. But their conversation turned and their voices rose in volume; his grandmother growing weary and his mother more bitter. He knew that they spoke of the father that he never knew, a man that was gone before he was there; returning only one Valentine’s day to take his mother away to Florida for a week, leaving them alone the next Monday and with a new baby nine months later. 

 

But they’d survived, gotten by. Bellamy worked two jobs, sometimes three, tried hard to pass every test at school, carried his mom to bed when one bottle of wine inevitably turned into four, five, vodka too. He watched his sister Octavia grow, tried really hard to raise her like the royalty four year old him had named her after. 

 

It was tough. 

 

It got harder when their mom took weeks out. Out of work, out of their home, out of their lives. She missed Octavia’s prom, Bellamy’s high school graduation, the due date for bills, rent. On Octavia’s fifteenth birthday she left for three weeks and Bellamy punched a hole in the kitchen wall, pressed his palms to his eyes until they burned as much as his knuckles and then carried his sisters cake to her, watched her blow out the candles and look at their front door that didn’t open. 

 

Two months ago their mother died. 

 

He emptied the house they grew up in, a building that was never a home. He ripped up the college headed letters that told him “ _ congratulations! _ ” for the fourth year in a row, watched them sit at the bottom of the trash can as more and more shit piled on top of the pieces. 

 

He was numb, didn’t know what to think, to feel, if he should cry because he was sad or because of the guilt he felt when the overwhelming sense of relief flooded his body. He punched more walls when social services turned up, with documents in tidy folders, all stating in black and white how his sister was a minor, motherless, better off with an adult with a steady job and income. 

 

Apparently at twenty one and living off wages from the local library, he was neither.

 

Bellamy watched her sob, felt his own tears stream down his cheeks, tasted the salt on his lips, as the strangers in suits shrugged their shoulders and waited for him to sign his only family over to a system that he knew wouldn’t help her. 

 

So he spent a night on his living room floor, barely noticed the black sky fill with clouds and sunshine again, his eyes red and raw from pouring over old letters, photographs, phone books. He’d tried countless numbers, addresses. The static sound of a dead phone line rang in his ears like white noise and it wasn’t until Octavia woke up and came to sit next to him that he found what he was looking for.

 

Or who he was looking for.

 

They left for Idaho that night, when the air was a little cooler and there was less people to watch them pack what little things belonged to them into Bellamy’s pick up truck, an old thing that was hardly red anymore, sunbleached and scratched but getting them where they needed to go. Octavia was asleep before they got out of the city so Bellamy was left to say goodbye to the things he loved alone.

 

The ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, City Lights Bookstore, The Castro Theatre, the pizza joint in the corner of twenty fourth street. There wasn’t many people to miss, not really, not even in a place as big as San Francisco, not for them. 

 

Everything and everyone Bellamy Blake required was in that stupid, old truck, and he’d be fucked if he needed anything else. 

 

So he was shocked when he felt an overwhelming sense of  _ home _ when he saw his grandmother on the porch of thirty two Neptune Corner, Shallow Valley. She was smaller than he remembered, but her smile was so much brighter than his memory served. Darna Blake still smelled of brown sugar and laundry detergent and she still wrapped her grandchildren into hugs like they were as a small as when she last seen them. She tutted at their lack of bags, guided them into a house filled with warmth and colour and nature, and they had glasses of fresh lemonade in their hands before they could even really say hello.

 

But this house was a home and Bellamy found that he struggled to say much, really. The walls had no holes, no patchwork DIY jobs or suspiciously placed photo frames. And the photo frames he could see had pictures in them, memories in colour and black and white, some with dates as far back as 1939 written in their corners. 

 

Sofas and chairs had multi coloured throws on them, hand knitted and smelling of brown sugar too. There were plants in every room, a multitude of shades of green, hanging from shelves and tucked into clay pots and every space felt lived in, soft and bright and warm. It was chaos, it was messy, it was lived in and it was someone’s home. A family home. 

 

When Octavia found a photo of their mother pressed flat under a flower pot, she cried. Silent tears that Bellamy found he couldn’t take away, because when he watched his grandmother wipe under his sisters eyes with more tenderness than he’d seen anyone else give her, he cried too. 

 

So they embraced it, together. The sun was still rising, the clock only seven am and the skies they’d left outside were just turning that pink blue Octavia loved. Together, they sat at the kitchen table, a marvel to both the younger Blake’s and their grandmother graced them with more lemonade, fresh muffins from the bakery and bacon that sizzled as they talked. It was quiet and hushed and more tears spilled, landing on photographs of a mother they once knew, in years that they liked to remember her, when she still smiled. They saw younger versions of themselves, on knees of family members they never really had the chance to know or love.

 

It was  _ sore _ . It hurt a lot, more than Bellamy had let himself be aware of. But this time, he let it happen, allowed it to. So he cried with his sister, his grandmother, let Octavia wipe her nose his shoulder, laughed when their grandmother wiped it away immediately with a dishrag. 

 

That’s when he think it happened. 

 

It happened quietly, in a silence, a slow rise like the sun. Warm like the summer morning, peaceful like the new day. It felt a lot like  _ hope _ , something Bellamy didn’t really know, something he certainly didn’t trust. 

 

He didn’t know this town, its people. He was wary, waiting for something to go wrong like it always did. He had no expectations, just a long, hot summer in one of Idaho’s smallest towns. One that he had to get through before trying his damn best to get into a good college, on a path to a good career.

 

He looked over at his sister and grandmother again, both of them with the same shaped eyes, whiskey coloured like all the Blakes. He tried not to see their shared smiles, tried to forget the feeling of home that was already planting roots between his ribs. This place, this town? With its town hall and tiny Main Street? It was a stop over, a means to an end. 

 

When Octavia turned eighteen next summer, they could get on with their lives, move back to San Francisco, back to the ocean and twenty four hour pizza delivery. 

 

It would be fine.

  
  



End file.
